authority channels and limit the spread of harmful misinfomation for election-related topics. We remain vigilant ahead of the 2022 elections.” Improvements on YouTube appear to have a ripple effect elsewhere. Researchers with NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics found that the platform’s December 2020 policy change to prohibit stolen-election claims was followed by a reduction in the prevalence of videos containing such false claims on Facebook and Twitter. The finding, described in a forthcoming paper, indicates once again the enormous influence that YouTube has across the rest of the internet. Video and the virus Beginning early in the pandemic, YouTube, along with Facebook and Twitter, banned coronavirus misinformation pushing phony cures, minimizing the seriousness of the disease, and undercutting public health directives on masking and distancing. These steps represented a reversal of the platforms’ previous insistence that they were not “arbiters of the truth” and therefore should not police misinformation. On at least some truths, YouTube and the others now conceded that they had to take a stand. They would favor fact-based content and point users to authoritative medical information. But even as YouTube took down hundreds of thousands of specious coronavirus videos—a total of more than 1.5 million by December 31, 2021—more kept surfacing. Playing whack-a-mole with dangerously false content often didn’t work, at least in part because YouTube allowed some of the most prolific promoters of such misinformation to keep their accounts. When YouTube has disciplined channels for disseminating coronavirus misinformation, it often has imposed only short suspensions, such as the week-long banishment of the pro-Trump outlet One America News Network.63 14 Sixteen months into the pandemic, the YouTube accounts of half of the 12 anti-vaccine activists named publicly by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as being responsible for creating more than 50% of all of the anti-vaccine content shared on social media remained easily searchable—and were still posting videos.64 It wasn’t until September 2021, when the company broadened its Covid-19 misinformation policy to ban all vaccination misinformation, that YouTube finally removed several channels associated with two of the leading names on the top-dozen list: Joseph Mercola and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom said they were unfairly censored.65 “YouTube is the vector for a lot of this misinformation,” Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, told The Washington Post in September 2021. “If you see misinformation on Facebook or other places, a lot of the time it’s YouTube videos. Our conversation often doesn’t include YouTube when it should.”66 “ Sixteen months into the pandemic, the YouTube accounts of half of the 12 anti-vaccine activists named publicly by the Center for Countering Digital Hate as being responsible for creating more than 50% of all of the anti-vaccine content shared on social media remained easily searchable—and were still posting videos. ” HOW YOUTUBE SPREADS HARMFUL CONTENT – AND WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT